A search service, e.g., a web-based search service, will generally receive a search query from a user through a user interface presented to the user by the service through a web browser on a computing device. Upon receiving a search query, a search service will generally direct the search query to a search engine for a specific corpus of resources. A search engine produces results based on the query. The search engine initially ranks the results according to one or more criteria including the relevance of the results to the query in the context of the corpus to which the query was directed. After the search engine produces the results, the search service presents those search results to the user.
Location information for documents in search results can be utilized to improve results that are presented to a user. Geotagging is a process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media, including web documents. Geotagged documents in search results can be leveraged to, for example, promote documents in search results for users located in a location associated with the documents, or to demote documents in search results for users in other locations. Location identification that can leverage the hierarchical nature of geographic locations would be particularly useful.